On 19th September 2025, the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) released an unclassified intelligence product warning of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda. This is the first time such a threat assessment has been disseminated by the US intelligence community since the withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan in 2021 and highlights, along with other recent coverage detailed below, the risks posed by a resurgent al-Qaeda and other transnational jihadi terrorist groups. This piece will address Afghanistan’s role as a permissive safe haven and sanctuary for these groups, highlight some of the recent intelligence on their operational capabilities, and discuss diplomatic efforts and other initiatives that may offer some cause for optimism amongst observers of al-Qaeda’s re-emerging threat.
Background
Following the Afghan Taliban’s return to power 2021, Western intelligence services have suffered from a significant human intelligence (HUMINT) collection vacuum in Afghanistan and a limited ability to engage with in-country HUMINT sources. Operational limitations, and the fact that sources felt abandoned by the US and its coalition partners, has limited cooperation with Western ‘3-letter’ intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, aka MI6), who have had to rely on their regional liaison partners, such as the Jordanians, for in-country HUMINT collection. The Afghan Taliban does have a growing intelligence relationship with US intelligence agencies, although the veracity of the intelligence it provides is open to debate, as noted recently by Ahmad Zia Saraj, a former head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, who has questioned the Afghan Taliban’s repeated narrative of a ‘secure Afghanistan’. As a result, much of the intelligence relating to terrorist groups in Afghanistan is publicly available information (PAI) or is gathered on an open-source basis. This piece draws upon both raw PAI as well as evaluated and finished open-source information, such as government reports.
Afghanistan as a safe haven
It is worth noting at the outset that the triad of the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani Network and al-Qaeda, together with its affiliates, are now to a large degree indistinguishable. The Afghan Taliban has provided governance experience (albeit limited, given they have only been in power for just over 4 years) and offers ideological leadership and operational infrastructure; al-Qaeda brings global coordination capabilities and the symbolic continuity of Osama Bin Laden's legacy; the Haqqani Network is known for its sophisticated and ruthless military operations and it plays a crucial role in logistical support and strategic planning. This mutual reliance has resulted in Afghanistan becoming, yet again, a safe haven for terrorist groups both within and from the country. As of April 2024, Afghanistan was the country most affected by Islamist terrorism, and between 1979 and 2024 the Afghan Taliban and its various offshoots (such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) was the deadliest terrorist group, accounting for over three-quarters of the victims of terrorist attacks that year.
It is no longer accurate, however, to discuss Islamic terrorist groups as distinct entities such as ‘core’ or ‘central’ al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), Boko Haram, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), TTP or colloquially the Pakistani Taliban, and al-Shabaab. Rather, all of these groups, and many others, work jointly on operations and are a self-described Islamic Army whose objective is to establish a global caliphate under the leadership of Hamza bin Laden (one of Osama bin Laden’s sons who, according to reports, could still be alive despite the first Trump administration asserting that he had been killed in an airstrike in 2019) and Saif al-Adl, the de facto leader of al-Qaeda.
During 2025, the Afghan Taliban has been quietly lifting restrictions on foreign and regional militants operating on Afghan soil. It is particularly disturbing that Afghanistan’s permissive turn coincides with "mounting indications that al al-Qaeda’s ambitions for external operations are once again on the rise", said Colin Smith, the United Nations (UN) Coordinator of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.
The Afghan Taliban deny that Afghanistan is a safe haven for terrorists. However, the UN Monitoring Team’s report of July 2024 stated that al-Qaeda “still uses Afghanistan as a permissive haven under the Taliban”, and even regional actors such as Russia and China have called for coordinated efforts to prevent the use of Afghan territory for terrorist activities. According to Ahmad Zia Saraj, Afghanistan is a "jihadist’s utopia" and “al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan today is multilayered and extensive”. In a statement that came as no surprise to those who study the region, a group of representatives from the European Union and other 13 countries stated on 1st October 2025 that it is “concerned over the persistent terrorist threat and cross-border migration security challenges emanating from Afghanistan”.
Operational capabilities
Whilst the Global War on Terror (GWOT) succeeded in disrupting and degrading al-Qaeda between 2001 and 2021, the group and its affiliates have reconstituted and grown substantially since 2021 because of the tacit support of the Afghan Taliban and other regional actors such as Iran. Al-Qaeda is now operationally far more capable than before the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. Two examples may be instructive.
Firstly, prior to 2001, al-Qaeda operated a small number of training camps in Afghanistan, the largest of which were Tarnak Farm near Kandahar and Zhawar Kili near Khost. There is compelling evidence from the UN that it now operates at least 10 (and by some separate unconfirmed estimates anywhere from 30 to 100) training camps, as well as operating safe houses and other facilities. Some of these camps and facilities are former CIA and Joint Special Operations Command installations, according to one of the author’s sources. Fighters have access to an enormous stockpile of military assets, valued at over $7 billion, that were either transferred to Afghan National Defence and Security Forces prior to the withdrawal or left behind by foreign forces, such as 17,000 pairs of night vision devices and over 23,000 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (Humvees). Estimates of the number of fighters ‘graduating’ from these camps vary widely, but recent research by Dr. Hamza Khan indicated that under al-Qaeda’s decentralised structure almost 500 seasoned al-Qaeda commanders have slipped into Taliban and TTP ranks. There are over 7,000 TTP fighters, 1,500 Baloch separatists and thousands more linked to al-Qaeda, ISKP, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, and Jaish-ul-Adl spread out across Afghanistan. It is also noteworthy that many of the Hamas operatives who committed the attacks in Israel on 7th October 2023 trained in Afghanistan.
Secondly, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has confirmed that the US Government has transported, in cash, at least $2.9 billion to the Afghan Taliban, ostensibly for humanitarian assistance but which in fact is distributed by its leadership as it sees fit, thus potentially funding terrorist groups it is aligned with. In addition, since 2022 the United Nations has purchased and transported at least $3.8 billion in U.S. currency into Afghanistan to fund the operations of international aid organizations. The US Government continues to transfer at least $40 million (in cash) per week to the Afghan Taliban for ‘aid’, as well as an additional $47 million per week as part of the Doha Agreement’s counterterrorism provisions. Incredibly, payments continued during the recent US Government shutdown, when federal government functions were not funded due to partisan disagreements over federal spending levels. Although some effort is being made to eliminate elements of this funding package, the degree to which this funding continues and the number of training camps and other facilities highlighted above should provide significant cause for concern. This funding is complemented by legitimate sources of revenue, such as from Afghanistan’s mining sector, as well as from more nefarious income streams, some of which may eventually find its way to terrorist groups the Afghan Taliban is aligned with.
These are but two brief but concerning examples of the leap in the potential external operational capabilities and funding of these terrorist groups. In addition to this in-country infrastructure that assists in training new fighters, recruits are increasingly being radicalised and recruited online, thus increasing exponentially the potential pool of new fighters, who may never even need to set foot in the training camps.
Diplomatic efforts and awareness campaigns
Over recent years, Western intelligence and diplomatic institutions have focused their resources on other priorities such as Russia, China, Great Power competition and the ongoing tensions between Israel and its neighbours, and arguably have overcorrected away from counterterrorism to these other priorities.
There is, however, some cause for optimism, particularly in relation to recent public pronouncements by several government officials and respected commentators. Under the new leadership of Joe Kent, a former Green Beret (the US Army’s Special Forces), the NCTC’s recent intelligence product displays a willingness to place relevant intelligence in the public domain. In addition, the sharing of unclassified intelligence by the likes of Syed Khalid Muhammad of CommandEleven - a private intelligence firm based in Pakistan - has sought to raise public awareness of the ongoing threat posed by jihadi terrorist groups. As it pertains to the UK threat environment, a recent speech by the Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum stated that “al-Qaeda and Islamic State are once again becoming more ambitious, taking advantage of instability overseas to gain firmer footholds. They are both personally encouraging and indirectly inciting would-be attackers in the West”. US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also recently stated that “Islamist terrorism continues to pose the greatest - both short- and long-term - threat to the American people on freedom and Western civilization”. These pronouncements may serve as an inflection point – collectively they will serve to raise awareness of transnational jihadi terrorist groups that many observers had forgotten about or at least thought posed no credible threat. In addition, US diplomats regularly engage with the Afghan Taliban government on matters of common concern, including the future of Bagram Air Base, and the Afghan Taliban itself has conducted extensive diplomatic outreach, including persuading Russia to formally recognise it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. On 2nd October 2025, India restored its diplomatic presence in Kabul and paved the way for formal recognition of the Afghan Taliban, although this decision may be more about safeguarding its own national interests by antagonising and weakening Pakistan than building relations with the Afghan Taliban. At a military level, Pakistan has recently conducted strikes again TTP facilities in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, an indication that it has lost patience with its neighbour in failing to combat terrorism. In addition, various resistance groups such as the National Resistance Front (under the leadership of Ahmad Massoud, whose father Ahmad Shah Massoud fought against the Taliban until he was assassinated two days before 9/11) and the Afghanistan Freedom Front have vowed to liberate Afghanistan, but their lack of co-ordination or unified command continues to hinder their progress in becoming a new Northern Alliance, who fought a defensive war against the Taliban between 1992 and 2001.
Conclusion
The growing and potent threat emanating from Afghanistan is greatly underestimated. Unfortunately, despite diplomatic and other efforts to raise awareness of the threat, local communities, law enforcement and intelligence agencies allocate their limited resources to other priorities. In the words of a former UK ambassador to a neighbouring country to Afghanistan in a conversation with the author “this is not your father’s Afghanistan. The image of a terrorist in a tunic and sandals is a misnomer. I can’t believe how far they have come. Their capabilities are infinitely greater than before 9/11 and we ignore them at our peril”.
Graham Aikin is a part-time PhD student at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, where he is researching the resurgence of terrorist groups in Afghanistan since the withdrawal in 2021. He has studied extensively the events of 9/11, its antecedents and the subsequent ‘Global War on Terror’. His Master’s dissertation focused on the UK Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s role in overseeing the UK intelligence agencies’ treatment of detainees and the sharing of intelligence with their liaison partners.
Photo by Farid Ershad on Unsplash
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